COMING
ATTRACTION:
ARIZONA’S LITTLE HOLLYWOOD MUSEUM
Imagine retrieving your
daily mail, and among the catalogs and bills, you open a carefully
wrapped package containing an original letter from Zane Grey
recommending filming locations for Riders of the Purple
Sage. Or maybe it’s the cinema program for
Der Kaiser von Kalifornien from Nazi Germany, or Jane
Russell’s haystack pinup skirt from The Outlaw. Those
are just a few of the items that have arrived at Joe McNeill’s
doorstep over the past five years. Joe, Sedona Monthly’s
creative director, began collecting memorabilia from movies
associated with Red Rock Country while writing Arizona’s
Little Hollywood: Sedona and Northern Arizona’s
Forgotten Film History 1923-1973, and he’s amassed
quite the collection. So what’s a movie buff to do with
clothing worn by Glenn Ford in The Redhead and the Cowboy,
billboard-sized movie posters, almost a thousand pages of
period newspaper clippings and recordings of filmmaker interviews?
Why, create a museum, of course.
Joe and his wife, Sedona
Monthly’s publisher Deb Weinkauff, recently disclosed
their plans to a select group of Sedona movers and shakers
for Arizona’s Little Hollywood Museum. While a permanent
location for the museum has yet to be decided, the couple
are currently working on creating a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization,
and they are looking for a temporary site where they can showcase
a portion of the thousands of items Joe has collected and
preserved.
While gathering photos
for Sedona Monthly’s movie series (which would
eventually morph into Arizona’s Little Hollywood),
Joe started coming across props and other film items for sale.
He really hit the jackpot when he purchased a shirt worn by
Elvis in the movie Stay Away, Joe. “At the
time it was just for fun,” says Joe. “I had no
conscious plan of collecting. I thought photos of the objects
would wind up as illustrations in the book, interspersed with
movie stills.”
As Joe became more serious – and
more curious – he started scanning auction catalogs
and auction Web sites. He also started contacting memorabilia
collectors and dealers. He says he tried to buy everything
he could get his hands on, but authenticity was always concern
No. 1. When he purchased what was thought to be the button-down
tunic John Wayne wore in Stagecoach, he wound up
returning it to the auction house after several historians
cast doubt on the shirt’s provenance. But there’s
no doubt about the legitimacy of Joe’s favorite item:
the hat James Stewart wore in Broken Arrow.
Joe considered donating
the collection to the Autry National Center of the American
West in Los Angeles, but Deb came up with a better idea: establishing
a museum in Sedona. Joe and Deb envision a serious museum
preserving Sedona’s film legacy – not a kitschy
tourist trap – that will serve as a “cultural
hub” for Sedona locals and visitors. They hope their
initial gift will eventually expand to include a research
library; concerts; movie screenings; an annual archival film
festival; movie location tours; a restaurant and gift shop;
and kids’ learning activities. “I expect Arizona’s
Little Hollywood Museum will quickly become Sedona’s
most popular visitor destination, second only to the red rocks
themselves,” says Joe. All the profits from the museum
will be used to fund arts education programs for students
in the Verde Valley.
So what are some of the
items Joe and Deb will endow to Arizona’s Little Hollywood
Museum? This list is too long to name in its entirety but
highlights include props from Station West and
The Rounders; original costume design sketches for Stagecoach,
California and Copper Canyon; local film
coordinator Lee Doyle’s business files; original scripts,
production documents and contracts, including Zane Grey’s
agreement assigning The Call of the Canyon film rights
to Famous Players-Lasky; vintage B Western fan club ephemera;
movie theater lobby displays; hundreds of fully restored movie
posters; original documents from the House Committee on Un-American
Activities; autographs; toys; and hundreds of VHS tapes, 16mm
film, laserdiscs and DVDs.
While Joe and Deb realize
it’s going to take time to pull everything together,
they say they want a temporary museum to open ASAP in order
to immediately benefit Sedona culturally and financially.
In the meantime, Joe says the preservation of Sedona’s
film history has already begun with the publication of
Arizona’s Little Hollywood, the content of which
will be used for the timeline in the museum’s permanent
exhibit. –– By Erika Ayn Finch; originally
published in the April 2010 issue of Sedona Monthly.
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